Oh Dear!

June 13, 2013

God help us:

Geez, I didn’t know how completely perfect and divine the womenfolk are — with their advanced thinking beyond logic, their “intuitive sense of how to heal this planet and make it thrive,” and their “profound capacity for feeling”! Clearly they have never met a Southern woman…oh, like this and this. I love you, Maggie Rose.

If you want your sanity back, I give you this fine piece of Southern intransigence:

You know, socially dominant norms like stable, nuclear families of a heteronormative persuasion. Here is my favorite line: “when we don’t realize that an animal also has its own complex embedded ambiguous life and it exists outside of our own use or interpretation.” Oh, sweetie, you have lost your damn mind. I appreciate that the comments section seems to concur — there is hope for Canada after all.

Like … wow. During the first minute of the “apology” video I thought this was going to be a setup for a joke. Surely this is a spoof that’s going to have a gag in just a few more seconds. But that moment never came. “They’re actually serious … creepy!” I’m at a loss for words.

Yeah, Will Ferrell did a spoof of it, but it is only somewhat humorous. You really can’t do a caricature of something that is already a caricature of itself. And, yes, creepy…I really cannot fathom why any woman would find this appealing. In fact, I would argue that it is condescending to women (pushing every stereotype to the hilt).

Now I’m reminded of the cover from the Wittenberg Door magazine. This was back in the 80’s. Anyway, on the cover, you see the editor of the Door saying something similar to “We wish to stand in unity with our feminist sisters everywhere and reaffirm our support of their struggles for justice” … or something similar. Then you discover the front cover folds out, and lo and behold you now see a woman holding a revolver to his head. I cannot help but wonder if any of these guys felt some kind of threat. Anyway, it’s a stray memory that popped back into my head as I thought about this.

Exactly…this contradiction is rampant in feminist literature and critical theory.

In this video, there is also the contradiction of advocating “a transcendence beyond all dualities” (i.e., the duality of male and female) yet posturing an unspecified (and strikingly feminine) masculinity. The end result is an androgynous other beyond the gender binary, yet an androgyny that is entirely feminine according to their definitions. After all, the feminine is what brings peace and harmony to the universe, while the masculine brings destruction and chaos.

The label of “speciesism” has not gained wide support, but the ideas are common enough in humanities faculties across the country, albeit less vocal than feminist-queer theory. This is why liberal couples think it is just as virtuous (if not more so) to have two dogs instead of kids. The idea of a distinct human “soul,” denied to animals, is just another norm used in our endless power struggle over the “other.” Not kidding. This is what they say.

Meanwhile, the mainline churches have gotten in bed with feminist-queer identity politics, as if this will have no repercussions for the sort of gender relations that perpetuates itself (i.e., marriage+kids). Naive, to say the least.

Wow. Well, I’ve known about Peter Singer for a long time and I took an environmental ethics class in college where we learned about things like “non-anthropocentrism” and “deep ecology” (as “these are are schools of thought”, not anything definitive). So I knew this kind of anti-human thinking existed. Just didn’t realize it had that much traction.

On the positive side, there is a growing number of anti-postmodernists who despise critical theory. This is especially the case in philosophy departments, which are reclaiming modernism (rational objectivity) and very much look down upon the other departments, especially Religious Studies and Women’s Studies, where critical theory reigns. In the choice between either Spinoza and Kant or Derrida and Foucault, I see younger guys clearly flocking to the former type (except for ex-evangelicals studying theology, who are always a bit behind the curve and anxious to display their feminist cred).

These are largely my anecdotal observations as an undergraduate in the early 00’s, but I’ve heard others express similar observations.

Postmodernism is utterly self-defeating; in this case it is truly legitimate to say that “there is no there there….” Also, the philosophy departments have a growing number of theists in them, ever since Alvin Plantinga and his colleagues developed Reformed Epistemology and showed that metaphysical assertions are not meaningless; indeed, they showed that the very logical positivists who claimed that metaphysical assertions are meaningless were themselves making a self-defeating metaphysical assertion in that very claim. Amazing.

Yes, there is a rigor in philosophy that prevents a lot of the nonsense that so easily overtakes other fields in the humanities and social sciences. At my college, the philosophy department (which was very liberal, mind you) was incredulous that critical theory was still being taught (in other departments).

And, yes, Plantinga and company have done immense amounts of good for Christian scholarship.